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PT2026. A3G65 2015      831'.6 C2014-907008-X      C2014-907009-8

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Pamela Nagasaka

Goethe’s Life and Work

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in 1749 into what he described as a “patrician” family in Frankfurt am Main. He succeeded early as a writer, first with his play Götz von Berlichingen (1773), and then with his novel The Sufferings of Young Werther (1774), which became a best-seller throughout Europe. Werther’s doomed passion for another man’s fiancée led to his suicide, but although the story was based on an episode in Goethe’s own life, the sequel for him was very different. In 1775 Karl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, a young man several years his junior, invited him for a visit; Goethe ended up staying for most of the rest of his life in Weimar, a small independent state among the many that made up Germany at that time.

The only substantial break was a two-year stay in Italy, mostly in Rome, where he painted, studied classical art, and wrote poetry in classical metres. Goethe played many roles in Weimar: administrator, theatre director, dramatist, poet, scientist, and companion to the Duke. In return Karl August gave him (as Goethe put it): “Friendship, leisure and trust; fields, and a house and garden.” The house was a country cottage close to the city, where he lived until his return from Italy, when he began his liaison with Christiane Vulpius, a relatively uneducated young woman who was not accepted socially by the Weimar court; Goethe claimed she had not read any of his works. They cohabited until her death in 1816, only marrying in 1806. They had several children, but only one survived into adulthood.

Goethe’s middle years were occupied with writing the first part of his epic drama Faust, and the first part of his two-part novel about Wilhelm Meister (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre). His friendship with the younger dramatist Friedrich Schiller lasted from 1794 until Schiller’s death in 1805. This period is known in German literary history as “Weimar classicism,” a time when Goethe reacted against the Romanticism he had helped to initiate in his own earlier “Storm and Stress” period of the 1770s. His dictum “What is classical is healthy, what is romantic is sick” reflects this change in attitude. Nevertheless, viewed as a whole, his work clearly belongs to the Romantic period as normally defined in English literary history, rather than to the classical “Augustan” age of the British eighteenth century. Goethe was not familiar with the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the first English Romantic poet to win his attention was Lord Byron.

Goethe’s later works in other genres, up to his death in 1832, included the second parts of Faust and the Wilhelm Meister novel (Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre). He became known as “the sage of Weimar,” visited by many famous or aspiring admirers, and his conversations were recorded for posterity by Johann Peter Eckermann.

Goethe’s literary horizons were wide. He foresaw the emergence of what he called “world literature” (Weltliteratur), and his own creative practice drew on many cultures. In a prose maxim, he wrote the following: “Do allow us oriental and southern forms as well as western and nordic ones in our collections of miscellaneous works.” He began his career as a poet by imitating North European folksongs and ballads, going on to learn from the Italian sonnet, the classical Latin elegy and epigram. Beyond Europe, unusually for his time, he studied the lyric poetry of Persia (resulting in the 1819 collection West-Eastern Divan) and China (resulting in the 1827 cycle Chinese-German Hours and Seasons).

His lifelong devotion to the “task” of self-development is one of the main keys to Goethe’s life and work. The Wilhelm Meister novel is known as the first Bildungsroman (novel of education, or development, or formation). This genre soon became a dominant form of European fiction, typically telling the story of a young person’s individual growth through love affairs and other adventures, as he attempts to find a vocation or position in his society. But in Goethe’s own case, the process of Bildung, of exploring different aspects of his potentials and talents, ended only with his life. Shortly before his death he wrote, in a letter dated 17 March 1832: “My most important task is to go on developing as much as possible whatever is and remains in me, distilling my own particular abilities again and again.” The drama of Faust, which occupied Goethe over a period of sixty years, reflects this spirit in the hero’s lifelong quest for self-development through many experiences, phases and roles. Because Faust is continually developing, his soul will not be forfeit to the devil, in spite of their bargain. Growth is redemption: “Whoever occupies himself with constant striving, he can be redeemed.”

Another key to Goethe is that all these different aspects, activities and phases represent the fulfillment over time of one’s underlying identity. Where traditionally a given human character was seen as essentially set for life, Goethe was among the first to see it as intrinsically developmental, incomplete at any one stage, and only fully unfolded in time. This change of view could be compared to the shift accomplished later by Darwin and others from seeing Nature as fixed order to seeing it as continually evolving. For Goethe the task of self-realization was a lifelong effort to become one’s true self, that is, one’s full self, a process similar to what Carl Jung later called “individuation.”

Full self-development may involve contradictions. Goethe appears to take both sides of most oppositions. It may be necessary to experience both sides of a situation or an issue, or to manifest qualities that seem like opposites. Goethe is both poet and scientist, romantic and classicist, a northerner attracted to the south, a westerner drawn to the east, an innovator and traditionalist, an adherent of both the ancient and the modern, of both the local (Weimar) and the global (world literature). To experience and reconcile these great opposites over a lifetime he sees as the way to human wholeness.

THEMES OF GOETHE’S POETRY

I have employed the idea of paired concepts as the basis for arranging my selection of Goethe’s poems into four broad sections, based not on a single theme but on a major opposition or pairing: Love and Solitude; Gods and Humans; Nature and Art; and Wit and Wisdom.